Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [179]
After racing across terrain whose fertile soil supports huge coconut plantations and through Phu Cat, Phu My and Hoai Nhon, small towns that saw great suffering in the war, the highway nears the coast at SA HUYNH, a pleasing fishing backwater perched on a broad curve of palm-fringed, golden sand. Speckled with scores of blue fishing boats, sleepy Sa Huynh makes a convenient and relaxing staging post en route from Nha Trang to Hoi An, and the roaring of its excitable surf masks the noise of traffic from the road; open-tour buses often make a brief stop here. For a decent meal, pull into the Vinh restaurant, which serves up excellent seafood at low prices, and is just a little further north of the run-down Sa Huynh hotel building (currently being demolished and rebuilt) on the right.
Shrimp farms, salt flats and vast expanses of paddy characterize the countryside above Sa Huynh. Once past Duc Pho, an R&R base for the Viet Minh in the late 1940s, and the tobacco plantations of Mo Duc, you quickly hit Quang Ngai.
The south–central coast | North to Son My |
Quang Ngai and around
Slender QUANG NGAI, clinging to the south bank of the Tra Khuc River some 130km south of Da Nang, is about as pleasant as you could expect of a town skewered until recently by Vietnam’s main highway. Highway 1, which once ripped through town, now skirts it to the east, leaving the town in a state of shocked silence. The area’s long tradition of resistance against the French found further focus during American involvement, for which the reward was some of the most extensive bombing meted out during the war: by 1967, American journalist Jonathan Schell was able to report that seventy percent of villages in the town’s surrounding area had been destroyed. A year later, the Americans turned their focus upon Son My Village, site of the My Lai massacre (see "The My Lai massacre"). This workaday settlement is worth visiting for its moving memorial garden and museum, or the peaceful My Khe Beach, nearby: the best way to get there is by xe om (get your hotel owner to negotiate a fare).
* * *
The south–central coast | North to Son My | Quang Ngai and around |
The My Lai massacre
The massacre of civilians in the hamlets of Son My Village, the single most shameful chapter of America’s involvement in Vietnam, began at dawn on March 16, 1968. US Intelligence suggested that the 48th Local Forces Battalion of the NVA, which had taken part in the Tet Offensive on Quang Ngai a month earlier, was holed up in Son My. Within the task force assembled to flush them out was Charlie Company, whose First Platoon, led by Lieutenant William Calley, was assigned to sweep through My Lai 4 (known to locals as Tu Cung Hamlet). Recent arrivals in Vietnam, Charlie Company had suffered casualties and losses in the hunt for the elusive 48th, but always inflicted by snipers and booby-traps. Unable to contact the enemy face to face in any numbers, or even to distinguish civilians from Viet Cong guerrillas, they had come to feel frustrated and impotent. Son My offered the chance to settle some old scores.
At a briefing on the eve of the offensive, GIs were told that all civilians would be at market by 7am and that anyone remaining was bound to be an active Viet Cong sympathizer. Some GIs later remembered being told not to kill women and children, but most simply registered that there were to be no prisoners. Whatever the truth, a massacre ensued, whose brutal course Neil Sheehan describes with chilling understatement in A Bright Shining Lie:
The American soldiers and junior officers shot old men, women, boys, girls, and babies. One soldier missed a baby lying on the ground twice with a .45 pistol as his comrades laughed at his marksmanship. He stood over the child and fired a third time. The soldiers beat women with rifle butts and raped some and sodomised others before